Native UI Components

There are tons of native UI widgets out there ready to be used in the latest apps - some of them are part of the platform, others are available as third-party libraries, and still more might be in use in your very own portfolio. React Native has several of the most critical platform components already wrapped, like ScrollView and TextInput, but not all of them, and certainly not ones you might have written yourself for a previous app. Fortunately, it's quite easy to wrap up these existing components for seamless integration with your React Native application.

Like the native module guide, this too is a more advanced guide that assumes you are somewhat familiar with Android SDK programming. This guide will show you how to build a native UI component, walking you through the implementation of a subset of the existing ImageView component available in the core React Native library.

ImageView example

For this example we are going to walk through the implementation requirements to allow the use of ImageViews in JavaScript.

Native views are created and manipulated by extending ViewManager or more commonly SimpleViewManager . A SimpleViewManager is convenient in this case because it applies common properties such as background color, opacity, and Flexbox layout.

These subclasses are essentially singletons - only one instance of each is created by the bridge. They vend native views to the NativeViewHierarchyManager, which delegates back to them to set and update the properties of the views as necessary. The ViewManagers are also typically the delegates for the views, sending events back to JavaScript via the bridge.

Register the manager in createViewManagers of the applications package.

Implement the JavaScript module

1. Create the ViewManager subclass

In this example we create view manager class ReactImageManager that extends SimpleViewManager of type ReactImageView. ReactImageView is the type of object managed by the manager, this will be the custom native view. Name returned by getName is used to reference the native view type from JavaScript.

Properties that are to be reflected in JavaScript needs to be exposed as setter method annotated with @ReactProp (or @ReactPropGroup). Setter method should take view to be updated (of the current view type) as a first argument and property value as a second argument. Setter should be declared as a void method and should be public. Property type sent to JS is determined automatically based on the type of value argument of the setter. The following type of values are currently supported: boolean, int, float, double, String, Boolean, Integer, ReadableArray, ReadableMap.

Annotation @ReactProp has one obligatory argument name of type String. Name assigned to the @ReactProp annotation linked to the setter method is used to reference the property on JS side.

Except from name, @ReactProp annotation may take following optional arguments: defaultBoolean, defaultInt, defaultFloat. Those arguments should be of the corresponding primitive type (accordingly boolean, int, float) and the value provided will be passed to the setter method in case when the property that the setter is referencing has been removed from the component. Note that "default" values are only provided for primitive types, in case when setter is of some complex type, null will be provided as a default value in case when corresponding property gets removed.

Setter declaration requirements for methods annotated with @ReactPropGroup are different than for @ReactProp, please refer to the @ReactPropGroup annotation class docs for more information about it.

IMPORTANT! in ReactJS updating the property value will result in setter method call. Note that one of the ways we can update component is by removing properties that have been set before. In that case setter method will be called as well to notify view manager that property has changed. In that case "default" value will be provided (for primitive types "default" can value can be specified using defaultBoolean, defaultFloat, etc. arguments of @ReactProp annotation, for complex types setter will be called with value set to null).

5. Implement the JavaScript module

The very final step is to create the JavaScript module that defines the interface layer between Java and JavaScript for the users of your new view. It is recommended for you to document the component interface in this module (e.g. using Flow, TypeScript, or plain old comments).

The requireNativeComponent function takes the name of the native view. Note that if your component needs to do anything more sophisticated (e.g. custom event handling), you should wrap the native component in another React component. This is illustrated in the MyCustomView example below.

Events

So now we know how to expose native view components that we can control easily from JS, but how do we deal with events from the user, like pinch-zooms or panning? When a native event occurs the native code should issue an event to the JavaScript representation of the View, and the two views are linked with the value returned from the getId() method.